Jason Moyer on 27/12/2015 at 04:01

---

I wonder if that chunkiness is similar to the problems Bethsoft games have if you're pinning 60 FPS vsync'd. Setting a framelimiter to your refresh rate usually fixes that. Had a similar issue with the new Shadow Warrior and a few other games, as well.

Judith on 27/12/2015 at 22:13

---

1. MGS V - not a perfect game, but it definitely shows what a real AAA title should be about. The scope and attention to detail is insane. Toying around with game's systems is a lot of fun for tens, if not hundreds of hours.

2. Life is Strange - kind of opposite of the above. Much smaller scope, and not a really 'gamey', but it has a great story that stays with you for a while. I love how a lot of it is told in-between the dialogue, through silence, interiors, landscapes, and music.

3. The Talos Principle - overstays its welcome by quite a few hours: at some point the puzzles aren't getting more difficult, they're just longer in terms of how many things you have to plan ahead and remember. Still, the world, the backstory and the gameplay feel great.

4. The Beginners' Guide - another great story / concept game from the developer of Stanley Parable. This time it's more about game critics, self-entitled players, the obsession of meaning, and a few other things.

Judith on 28/12/2015 at 08:50

---

Or, let's take the water pistol, for example. It appears late in the game, it's ridiculously expensive to develop, and you can do without it, but changes the gameplay so much. You can splash water on the ground and lure enemies without raising the alarm. You can extinguish torches and fires (you can even douse the Man on Fire, if you're patient enough!). You can destroy electrical equipment with it (comms, etc.). You can even destroy satellite dishes – you have to look for the air vent on the housing, so the water gets inside and destroys the components. That amount of attention to such a tiny detail in a vast open-world game is completely insane.

Now try pitching such idea to EA, Activision or other big western publisher executives – their heads would explode just thinking how much it would cost to implement it.

Ostriig on 4/1/2016 at 13:00

---

Ok, I've taken to playing fewer, larger games this year, so here's my crop from 2015 in no particular order. The ones I more pointedly remember. Now that I think about it, I might as well call this list "games with really long load times."


The Witcher 3. I mean, let's get this out of the way - I played both the Wild Hunt original campaign and the Hearts of Stone expansion, and TW3 is the best game I played all year and, quite frankly, the best time I've had with a game since I played the first Deus Ex some sixteen years ago. I think I've rolled this praise onto it before.

A massive open world that feels alive and worth exploring, painted in beautiful strokes and draped in touching musical accords, so much so that many times I found myself walking or cantering through a new location just to take in the mood of the place. The plot is hardly a revelation and it's plentyful in holes, but the strength of the game's writing lies with its nuanced and often-conflicted characters, their moments and interplay, as well as the depth and attention to detail given to secondary quests around the world. It's a world that's often left me, as the player, feeling exhausted and forlorn, and yet I seldom felt like it was trying to force anything down my throat.

I did get some of that dreaded instability with the middle patches, but I gotta give CDPR credit for rolling them out at a steady pace, including gameplay fixes and improvements. I can't say exactly how much time I spent with the game, due to bugs with the play counter, but I'm sure that, including the expansion, I've clocked in well over the hundred hour mark. And loved it, it feels like a game with heart.

Anyway, cutting it short, GOTY for me, not even a contest. Now waiting for Blood and Wine.


GTA V. On PC. Didn't finish it. At its best, it feels like I'm playing "Goodfellas, the Game", at its worst it's all like "what the hell do I have to do now?" The heists, the story bits are all entertaining, beautifully put together with captivating performances from the cast and engaging, explosive gameplay. Well, less the bits where you have to fly. But in-between I'm left in this big, urban sandbox where I can do a lot of things that I don't care about and I'm often confused as to how to progress the main plot thread. It's great that you can tow cars and stack boxes, but I really don't want to do that. And even the driving mini-quests turn into a giant, boring pain, when I have to spend forever trying to lose the fuzz. All in all, that giant city just feels empty when I'm left between plot episodes, a lick of paint over repetitive and dull gameplay constructs.

I'm not a big fan of all the diegetic interfaces in here and "realistic" vehicle behaviours. On the former, I like the idea of making your GUI elements part of the game world, but in GTA V they mostly get in the way. The phone, the browser, the wardrobe... they all feel a little on the clunky side. As for the latter, Saint's Row arcadey driving is far more my speed, and the aerial controls made me want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.

Other than that... it's pretty. It looks good, it's a hell of a lot of fun at its high points and terribly dull at its lows, and I kinda just left it aside for some other time.


Fallout 4. Now here's a game that should pick up a flower and start playing "he loves me, he wants to bash my head in, he loves me, he wants to bash my head in..." I love it, I really do, but quite regularly I just feel like... unf.

Fallout 3++. Bethesda Game Studios Game #5. Skyrim with Laser Rifles. Any of the jokes work, and that's perfectly fine, we all had a pretty good idea of what we were getting into and the game delivers on most of it, good and bad. It's a big, open world, with all sorts of interesting locations, things to do and shallow characters. And it looks very good, too, in spite of the dated engine. The load times, however, will really grind your nerves since you'll be seeing load screens quite often. On the upside, once the modding tools come out, the community should be faced with a fairly familiar platform.

So, the good. The world is more varied and interesting that in Fallout 3. The gunplay is much improved. I'm actually quite ok with the new skills system, I think it works very nicely. Weapons and armour customisation system is great, if feels balanced and rewarding. Settlement building is fantastic. Extremely rough around the edges, Howard did reveal it started out as a sideproject in the game's development, but once it gets its claws into you, it doesn't let go. And it's an excellent thematic fit for the game. I also enjoy the voiced protagonist. There are some problems with the scene direction, as I've argued before, I think a less jolly, more JC Denton-stoic delivery approach would've avoided some jarring situations. I like the conversation camera too, adds a little flavour to exchanges.

And the bad. As usual, the UI. Bethesda have genuinely tried to move it forward, streamline and improve it, as evidenced by the quick-loot feature or the basic filtering in inventory lists, and they should get credit for that. But in the end, I still end up fighting it over little things, fidgety clickables, nonsensical mappings, endless scrolling through extensive lists and so on. And also as usual, Fallout 4 comes starkly short on dramatic delivery. Nevermind the generic radiant quests and Preston's neverending list of needs, the characters themselves are still one-dimensional and archetypal. Companions feel like static props out of a catalogue. Ultimately, you're given little agency at the story level and the choices you're given in conversations are little more than wallpaper over a linear progression. The big reveal at the end of the second act, although predictable, feels better executed than similar moments in Fallout 3 or Skyrim, but still, nothing out of the ordinary. I'd also wager there's somewhat less content this time around, fewer quests and such.

Fallout 4 doesn't suffer from a lack of investment on the developers' side, from the details of environmental storytelling in maps to settlement building, it's obvious the crew put heart into making the game, and it's not that hard to gloss over some of its rough edges and yes, put up with the UI, in face of the sheer scope of the thing. It's a given that I'll have spent more time in Fallout 4 than The Witcher 3, but at the same time, I'm left unsatisfied in a way. It's like this big, fascinating world is aching for an involving adventure, with complex characters and exciting plot points, but it's destined to go without.

In any case, it looks like it's hard for me to be brief about Fallout 4.


Pillars of Eternity. This is the one I was waiting to finish before hopping into this thread, I nailed it yesterday. I took a break from what seemed like a mixed bag and came back to it over the holidays to take it to its conclusion, and discovered that it's actually quite the unpolished gem.

I guess that PoE's principal failure is that it's slow on the pick-up. In all respects. You're dumped into a brand new world, forged of original content, that should sound somewhat familiar... But it's not familiar enough, and between some dubious choices for stuff's names and an extremely expansive backlore, it ends up feeling like a joke from a DM Of The Rings strip. Sulphur was right earlier, it does feel like the game is trying to compensate the lack of an interesting plot hook with a fortress of text at every click. It's the only game I wear my glasses for. And even after finishing it, I'm still not clear on who does what to whom with what and how many times.

And, like I said, this sluggish, dull introduction doesn't apply only to the story, but the visuals as well. This is a game I picked up for the graphics, to put it simply. Many years ago, I fell in love with the stunning 2D visuals of Disciples 2 (you thought I was gonna say Baldur's, didn't you?) and I've been hankering for something new and pretty and as flat as a Fallout 4 companion's character. But at the start of PoE and for a good while after, you're treated to some nicely rendered but otherwise dull and flavourless backdrops, all the way from Gilded Vale to and including Defiance Bay.

But the game does catch up in both plot and visuals. After leaving Defiance Bay you do get treated to some more exciting-looking locales and, eventually, the story wakes up too. On the very last stretch of the game, but it does genuinely get interesting then, the revelations that follow and some of the questions posed to you make it worthwhile. Even prior to that, through the rest of the game, you get faced with interesting some challenging choices and you have a colourful array of companions at your side, it's just the main plot thread itself that keeps you in the dark for most of your time.

Combat-wise, it's eh, ok. Your mileage may vary depending on your preferences. I didn't find the not-D&D system all that enjoyable, mostly because I couldn't be arsed to refamiliarise myself with the new stuff. And it shows, I wasn't all that good at it, even ended up cheating my way past the last bit of the final encounter when it looked like I was going to wipe again after more than an hour of previous attempts. I just figured I wanted my ending by that point. The HQ-building features are interesting enough too, but nothing to knock you off your feet.

But this gripe does deserve its own paragraph - why the hell are the loading times so obscenely long?! They're roughly on par with Fallout 4, even on an SSD, and I'm having a hard time finding a resonable excuse for it. Especially since you'll be seeing loading screens even more often than in Fallout 4.

All in all, I did enjoy it quite a lot and it's a very nice old-school RPG experience. Not sure that I'll go chasing the expansion pack,rushed through this one as it is, but I'll definitely keep my eye out for a sequel. Just get comfortable with not being totally sure about what's going on.

Ostriig on 4/1/2016 at 15:27

---

You don't get XP for fights? I think you might just now be seeing how blasé I was about the mechanical underpinnings of PoE's combat, I just tried to manage aggro and throw what I had at mobs. To the game's credit, on Easy I could almost finish it even with that sort of attitude, before the last fight significantly spiked difficulty over the encounters leading up to it. I actually might've finished it fair and square on that last attempt, but I was tired and didn't wanna chance it anymore.

I don't necessarily mind not getting XP for combat, if anything I imagine it made balancing stealth or persuasion paths easier, the game does offer you the ability to talk yourself to a conclusion at times. Deus Ex it did it that way, too. But yeah, the encounters in the first part of the game do feel, as you put it, "protracted" and I can't help but wonder whether that's a leftover from the D&D model, or if Obisidan banked on it making the game just a little longer. I mean, if it works for BioWare... In any case, encounters got noticeably faster for me in the latter part of the game. By that point I could one or two-turn a lot of basic foes if I focused the party on them.

It's tricky, I kinda feel bad about hyping TW3 so much, wouldn't want to overly raise people's expectations to the point they don't get as much out of it. I did find two people who weren't that taken with it, so you know, your mileage may vary. But when I first got it installed, I also booted it up for a half hour "just to see if it's working" and ended up putting two hours into it.